


rocket science

by yoonbot (iverins)



Category: ITZY (Band), Stray Kids (Band)
Genre: Alternate Universe - High School, F/M, Gen, Growing Up, M/M, Non-Linear Narrative, Sibling Rivalry, Slice of Life, Teen Romance
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-08-14
Updated: 2019-08-14
Packaged: 2020-07-28 02:57:16
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,940
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20056900
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/iverins/pseuds/yoonbot
Summary: Imagine: twin planets, circling a single, gargantuan star in an otherwise lonely universe. And, give or take some, that's just celestial mechanics.Or: Hyunjin and Yeji both have a crush. It just happens to be on Seungmin.





	rocket science

**Author's Note:**

  * For [hachimitsuto](https://archiveofourown.org/users/hachimitsuto/gifts).

> [love's not supposed to be rocket science](https://open.spotify.com/playlist/7kJQsM7w4wGML014wZP09r?si=xa7d1ZRbQgWjfkuBQ1eAfw)
> 
> **to shida ♡:** this fic turned out 3x longer than intended and is almost three weeks late... all i can say is please look forward to the [redacted] fic that you accidentally manipulated me into writing when you tried to throw off my scent for the fic you gifted me!!

Hyunjin holds out for a good ten minutes before he finally blurts: "I can't _believe_ you and Seungmin hung out today and you didn't _tell me._"

When Yeji glances over, he's making a face at the red crosswalk signal before looking both ways and pedaling on. She sighs, rolls her eyes, and rollerblades after him. "I mean, that's just the rules of twinhood!" Hyunjin continues, Yeji only catching the tail-end of it behind him. "You can't leave me out of the loop like this!"

"Last time you came to study with us, you almost got us kicked out," Yeji scowls, pushing him lightly with her shoulder so he goes off-kilter for a second. The setting sun turns the asphalt before them orange, blinding. "Last time as in last _week._ Did you already forget?"

Hyunjin scrunches his nose, annoyed, tilting his head back to push his too-long fringe out of his face. "Hey," he defends. They pass through the shade of the tallest apartment complex in their neighborhood, coloring them in navy for a moment. Not a cloud in the sky today. "I was _totally_ being productive."

Yeji gives him a look. "Hyunjin, you played a rhythm game on your phone full-volume for a good five minutes before you realized your headphones weren't plugged in." And then, after he'd been kicked out, he'd waited outside on the steps of the library, hugging his backpack, and sent Seungmin an _I'M BOREDDDD // play with me ㅠㅠ_ text every five minutes.

"You're ridiculous, Hyunjinnie," Seungmin laughed at the shocked expression on his face when he came out an hour and a half later for some fresh air and plunked a vending machine coffee can onto his head.

Hyunjin had frowned in retaliation. "Too bad you love me," he sniffed, the cicadas chirping around them, air hot and stuffy, typical of a mid-summer noon.

Seungmin laughed at that too with a "You wish," and yeah, Hyunjin thought, looking into the little hole of his coffee can like he could disappear into that caffeinated universe of darkness, he really did. That's when Yeji had stormed out with her own bottle of green tea, made them scoot down so she could sit on Seungmin's other side, and reached over him to hit Hyunjin in the back of the head when he gulped down half of her drink. They all took turns pressing the still-icy-cold bottle to their necks before heading back inside.

Hyunjin, unable to one-up his sister, just sticks his tongue out. Because summer's always been: Hyunjin, Yeji, and Seungmin, and the sweat sticking onto their skin as they walk back home from the convenience store with their Samanco, always teasing Seungmin for eating his tail-first. Watching the same old VHS movies that they can recite the lines to on the same old TV Hyunjin lugged into his already-tiny room the month before their first year of high school because, "He's a pack rat," Yeji whispered to Seungmin when Hyunjin left to use the bathroom. Staying up late to help Hyunjin finish the summer homework he procrastinated on but always ending up falling asleep around Seungmin's kitchen table the night before they go back to school instead, the fan whirring through the cicada songs coming through the open window, oscillating until Yeji wakes them all up at dawn.

Yeji laughs and pushes his head once he hops off his bike. "You're gonna eat a bug if you keep doing that, you know?" She skates past him after he opens the door, even though the neighbors have complained several times about her doing that. "C'mon," she says happily, pressing the elevator button while Hyunjin locks his bike in the racks, grumbling to himself about how she’s _so mean when **I’m** the older twin,_ "I bet dinner's ready."

Seungmin told Hyunjin one day last semester, when they'd walked home together, too hungry to wait for Yeji's soccer practice to end, that he wanted to be an astronaut. To which Hyunjin, somewhat awed, said: "Can you really be an astronaut if you barely make the time limit for the sixteen-hundred meter?"

Seungmin punched him in the shoulder. "Hey!" he'd cried out, but when they made eye contact, they both started laughing, long and for no real reason. "That has nothing to do with this!" he insisted once he'd finally caught his breath, nudging Hyunjin. And when Hyunjin still didn’t stop grinning, "That has nothing to do with this," he repeated, petulant.

That night, after giving Yeji his and Seungmin's leftover _tteokbokki_ to stop her from chewing him out, Hyunjin spent hours researching astrophysics and the cosmos that the next morning, when he'd overslept and had to lean over to ask Seungmin if he could copy his math homework the period before, Hyunjin saw a galaxy in the familiar curve of Seungmin's smiling eyes. “Fine,” he’d said, placing his notebook into Hyunjin’s lap, “but you owe me,” except instead of exasperated, he’d just shook his head at Hyunjin’s mouthed _you’re the best, Seungminnie!_, fond. Imagine knowing right then that you were being drawn into an inevitable gravitational pull – that you had been for a while now – and that only a carefully calculated escape velocity would allow you to break free from orbit.

Imagine: the month after, Hyunjin caught Yeji looking at Seungmin in this certain way he’d never noticed before. Like, in the midst of the vast emptiness that is space, she'd seen the bloom of a supergiant in the distance and found herself indescribably drawn to it. Hyunjin didn't realize he'd been staring until Yeji happened to meet his gaze. The two of them understood, in that moment.

Imagine: twin planets, circling a single, gargantuan star in an otherwise lonely universe. And, give or take some, that's just celestial mechanics.

Yeji rounds the corner, coming to a stop before where Seungmin's standing next to his bike, looking at his phone. He locks it, smiles, and puts it back into his backpack. "Did Hyunjin oversleep again?" he asks knowingly as Yeji catches her breath, hands on her knees.

"Yeah," Yeji grumbles. Seungmin offers her his water bottle, still sweating and cold, to which she shakes her head. "I tried to wake him up but he's being a big baby about it." The summer morning sun is bright and Seungmin's laugh is blinding. She shields her eyes from the glare. "That's why I'm late. Sorry."

"Nah," Seungmin says, swinging a leg around his bike. When he turns to face her, there's a streak of unblended sunscreen tracing the side of his cheek. Yeji makes a motion for him to smooth it out and his mouth makes an "o" in recognition before he wipes at it. "Thanks. And I always leave five minutes later when I know Hyunjin's coming, anyway."

Yeji makes a face. "He's gotten that bad, huh?" But the few times Yeji's left Hyunjin behind to be punctual on her own, Seungmin had been waiting in front of his apartment building already, standing next to his purple bike on the side of the road, head bowed as he scrolled down his phone. And every time he heard her skates approaching, he looked up and gave her a toothy grin, and Yeji apologized for making him wait.

Seungmin smiles, open-mouthed. "He's gotten that bad," he confirms, pedaling alongside her, their shadows forming a two-headed monster on the asphalt.

It's funny, sometimes, to think about their lives before Seungmin. Funny because, despite being twins, growing up, Hyunjin and Yeji hadn't been that close at all. In primary school, Hyunjin had his own friends that would play tag with him in the hallways and get yelled at with him by their homeroom teachers, and Yeji would hear them laughing about getting in trouble from where she was sitting by the window in her own classroom, eating the picked-out carrots in her friend's lunch box. And while Yeji got perfect scores on math tests, Hyunjin was always near the bottom of the class. He would ask her once they were home if he could copy her homework, to which she'd just tell him to buzz off, and then he'd go whine to their parents about how mean she was. They didn't talk much apart from that.

When they were in fifth grade, Yeji's best friend told her during physical ed that she had a huge crush on Hyunjin, and it made Yeji cry in the middle of dodgeball. "I'm sorry," her friend said the next day, after Yeji went home and called Hyunjin a butt head over dinner and he gave her the silent treatment because of it. _Serves him right!,_ she'd told her mom when she tried to get Yeji to apologize. She handed Yeji a fancy piece of chocolate that they both mentioned liking before. "I won't like him anymore if it makes you sad." And while the chocolate was sweet as Yeji nibbled on it, something about it left a bitter taste in her mouth and made her feel like the bad guy.

But Yeji technically met Seungmin first. Once they started middle school, and Yeji's best friend moved thirty minutes away by subway, and early on in the school year, she'd been assigned to do classroom chores with him. Seungmin was the type to mop every corner carefully, and while Yeji was wiping the blackboard clean, Hyunjin had thundered down the hall, stuck his head through the window of their classroom, and said, "I'm walking home without you, slowpoke!" before running off with one of his classmates.

"My brother," Yeji frowned when she and Seungmin were rinsing off their washcloths in fountain outside. Seungmin hummed in wordless acknowledgement. "He's always like this."

He laughed at that. "Doesn't sound like you two get along," he pointed out as he wrung the mop dry.

"Yeah," Yeji echoed. The water was warm on her palms amid the winter. "We don't." Except Hyunjin was waiting at the front gate when Yeji and Seungmin got there with his head down, and the three of them walked together in relative silence until they reached Seungmin's apartment building, five minutes away from theirs. "See you tomorrow, Yeji," he waved before disappearing behind the gate. He considered Hyunjin too, who finally looked up from staring at his toes. "Yeji's brother." They waited until the door closed completely before continuing down the road.

"Is he, like, your boyfriend or something?" Hyunjin asked abruptly, once they'd turned the corner.

Yeji rolled her eyes. "None of _your_ business," she'd replied, swinging her backpack over her shoulder after grabbing her keys – the whole reason why Hyunjin had ended up waiting for her in the first place. And the three of them have been walking home together ever since.

Now, Yeji chews on the straw of her iced coffee across from Seungmin, who's leaning back after being hunched over his prep book for an hour. "Hyunjin says he's on his way," he yawns. "Should I get him his drink?"

A drip of condensation from the rim of her cup wets the page of her notebook. Yeji watches as her notes, carefully penned in, bleed around the perimeter. "You don't have to," she tells him. When she uncrosses her legs under the table, she kicks the bag with her soccer cleats in them instead of Seungmin's shin. Recrosses them. "You know, in Hyunjin speak, that means he's only just started showering. And doesn't he still owe you for ice cream last time?"

"It's okay," Seungmin says, already rifling around his backpack for his allowance. "I'm gonna make him owe me so much that he'll have to buy me an apartment in Gangnam someday." He grins at her, like this is a secret between the two of them. "He likes the iced Americano here, right?"

Before Yeji can saying anything else, Seungmin's already walking up to the counter to order. She sighs, tracing the edges of the water splotch on her notebook in defeat. "You don't have to," she mumbles again, quiet, to no one in particular.

At Yeji's first soccer match of the summer, Hyunjin asks Seungmin without much thought: "Do you ever wonder what it'd be like if you liked Yeji?"

Seungmin, whose eyes have been glued to the game the whole time, gaze following the ball back and forth, doesn't turn to look at him. "Like," Hyunjin continues, gesticulating out of nervousness. A whistle blown on the field punctuates his thoughts. "_Like_ like. Have you ever thought about it?"

Seungmin presses his lips together. There's a tiny red bump on his chin where he'd told Hyunjin that he'd gotten a mosquito bite last week, on the side with the mole on his cheek. In the absence of everything else, Hyunjin maps the distance between them on Seungmin's face with his eyes, like some kind of topographical constellation. And then Seungmin says, "Red card."

"Huh?" Hyunjin whips his attention back to the game that he realizes he hasn't really been watching at all, only to find it continuing on. Yeji gets the ball from one of her teammates, shoots, and scores, her ponytail bobbing up and down as they jump together in victory. "What do you mean?"

Seungmin's looking at him when Hyunjin turns back to face him. There's a smile tugging on the corner of his lips that he doesn't seem to want to let spill over. "I mean," he starts. "That I can't answer that." Hyunjin watches as he wipes his palms against his shorts. Sometimes, he wondered what it'd feel like, holding Seungmin's sweaty hand in the midst of the hottest week of summer so far. "You guys are twins."

"Oh," Hyunjin replies. They wave to Yeji, who's grinning at them both from where she's taking a break on the bench. Now Hyunjin feels stupid for starting this whole conversation. "Okay." He really shouldn't have asked.

Seungmin nudges his knee with his own as if to say _that's okay._ "Did she tell you to ask me that or something?" he questions, taking a sip from his water bottle. He offers it to Hyunjin, but he shakes his head.

"No." The noon sun is bright and overwhelmingly warm against his skin as he shields his eyes from the glare. Maybe that's what holding Seungmin's hand right now would feel like. “She didn’t.” And then Hyunjin's back to wondering.

It rains the next afternoon. Over the alien glow of the first Pokemon movie that they've watched more times than they can count on two hands, the three of them play rock-paper-scissors to decide who gets to run down to the convenience store in the downpour and buy their usual Samanco.

"You guys suck," Seungmin frowned once he realized the two of them threw paper. Hyunjin just laughed on the floor of his room while Yeji smiled apologetically and went to go find her umbrella for him. "If I catch a cold, it's all your fault!"

Hyunjin wrapped his feet around one of Seungmin's ankles, the fan blowing his still too-long fringe into his face. "Thank you, Seungminnie," he cooed up at him, trying to hug his legs.

"_Gross._" But even as he tried to fend Hyunjin off, Seungmin had been laughing too. Yeji started poking him in the back when she came back with the umbrella, tickling Hyunjin enough to finally let Seungmin go.

Without Seungmin sitting between them, the two of them are silent, other than the pouring rain outside and Hyunjin saying, as soon as the door closed behind Seungmin, "I feel bad for making him go."

Yeji shrugged. "Better him than you." She started rinsing the plate they'd eaten watermelon on – Hyunjin always tried to finish his slices as quickly as he could so he could choose the best ones for himself, leaving Seungmin and Yeji with the paler, unsweet ones. "You always buy me the wrong kind."

"It's not _my_ fault that the green tea one goes out of stock the fastest!" Hyunjin insisted, even though that was only once. Other times, the green tea flavor wasn't on sale like the other kinds, and Hyunjin was stingy with his allowance. Yeji just rolled her eyes.

Now, Yeji pulls her knees to her chest. "Hey," she starts. Hyunjin hums from where he's still focused on the tiny TV screen, even though they both know that the VHS skips a little in the first twenty minutes. Their mom told him to throw it out before, even offering to buy him a new one online, but he'd staunchly refused, and they argued about it for a week until Hyunjin cried during breakfast and their mom conceded. He'd gone to school puffy-eyed that day and Seungmin wouldn't stop laughing at him for it. That was maybe two years ago, but it's still so _Hyunjin_ – the Hyunjin that gets so attached to inanimate objects that taking them away is like taking away a friend.

"He's like a kid," Seungmin whispered to her during lunch. They watched as Hyunjin ate his bread with his head ducked down, staring intensely at his lap.

"Don't say that," Yeji remembers sighing. "Or else he'll start crying again."

"What were you and Seungmin talking about yesterday?" Hyunjin turns toward her suddenly at that, resting his cheek on the pillow he's holding. "At my soccer match?"

He makes a face before looking away again. "Nothing." He blinks once, twice, three times. Yeji knows because she counts. "Nothing important to you, at least."

"_Okay,_" Yeji replies, drawing out the last syllable in skepticism. Outside, the rain's still pelting against the small window of Hyunjin's bedroom. On screen, Pikachu falls into a river. There's got to be some kind of cinematic parallel there, she thinks. "That doesn't explain why you were so sulky for the rest of the day."

Hyunjin absentmindedly scratches a bug bite on his ankle. "I was _not_ sulky," he mumbles.

Yeji kicks one of his outstretched legs. "You were _so_ sulky." The second time, she misses and catches the base of the oscillating fan instead, causing it to rattle loudly. And then, once more after it settles, silence. It gives her an odd sense of déjà vu to this thought she's had before on a rainy summer afternoon like this one, sitting on the floor of Hyunjin's room with the both of them waiting for Seungmin to come back and –

"I was just," Hyunjin interrupts after a moment. "I've just been...thinking. A lot these days, I guess." She watches as his silhouette shrugs. "It's not really a big deal."

Yeji doesn't really know what to say to that. So: "Okay," she says again. "Maybe that means you're finally growing up or something, huh? Mom and Dad'll be happy."

"_Hey – _" Hyunjin begins to protest before the intercom rings. He shoves his feet back into his slippers. "I'll get it!"

Yeji exhales, star-fishing onto her back once he's left the room. In the distance, she can hear Seungmin complaining about his soaking wet socks and Hyunjin laughing as he suggests that they use the hair dryer and the fan's whirring two feet away from her and there's the storm, still going strong, outside. And the thought, inundating in the otherwise silence, is:

She listened to their mom ask their dad in the kitchen, on the other side of a closed door – _If Hyunjin's like this just with inanimate objects,_ and Yeji remembers the aftertaste of a sweet slice of watermelon that she'd won over Hyunjin, _then how’s he going to be like when it eventually comes to people?_

The summer Seungmin started attending English classes, Hyunjin locked himself in his room for two days. "You're being annoying, you know?" he remembers Yeji sighing on the other side of the door after he'd called _Go away!_ when she told him that Seungmin wanted to go get _bingsoo._ "And you're making Seungmin sad, too."

"Hyunjin," Seungmin had said, knocking on his door at the end of the second day. Before that, he'd sent him a long string of texts saying variations of _let's go out and have some fun! // hyunjin? hyunjinnie??? // are you angry at me? // you're throwing a tantrum again huh ㅋㅋ_ that Hyunjin didn't bother to answer. "Hey. Can we talk?"

"No." He'd turned in his bed, moving to occupy the still-cool side. "We can't."

Seungmin kept knocking. "Hyunjin, let me in," he said again, persistent. "Pleeeease?"

Hyunjin frowned. "It's open."

"Oh." He heard Seungmin crack open the door and then close it behind him gently, walk over to Hyunjin's bed in the pair of guest slippers that were basically his, and crawl into Hyunjin's bed beside him, on the side Hyunjin just vacated. If he noticed the heat, he didn't say anything about it. "Was it unlocked this whole time?"

"I don't know," Hyunjin grunted in response, his back still facing Seungmin. "Who cares?"

Seungmin hummed in understanding. It was like Seungmin to do that – to be the person between them to hold out his hand after they'd fought. To help Hyunjin with his math homework after school when Yeji got impatient, to listen to Hyunjin whisper his dreams to him over the phone, quiet enough so no one else would know. And when Hyunjin cried over a bad test score, Seungmin would put his hand over his and tell him it was okay, that tests weren't everything and that they'd work harder for the next one. They laid like that, Seungmin on his back and Hyunjin with his back to him, for a while. In their silence, time passed languidly, and it made Hyunjin start to regret what he'd done.

"Are you mad because I have to go to _hagwon_ now?" Seungmin asked gently.

Hyunjin turned his head to look at him. "No," he stubbornly insisted. The smell of fabric softener clung onto the t-shirt Seungmin was wearing. "I don't know," he ended up admitting.

"I just – " Seungmin met his gaze. Hyunjin turned onto his back then too, their shoulders touching just slightly. He covered his face with his hands. "It's stupid."

Seungmin laughed a little at that. "Do you remember," he started, Hyunjin peeking at him from between his fingers. "That time when the three of us went to that ice cream place? And I'd gotten these new white sneakers for my birthday, and I was so excited that I got to wear them out for once. And as soon as I got my ice cream – " he held his hands up into the air so Hyunjin could see him snap, " – I _dropped_ it. On my new shoes! And we all just froze for a minute, and I was so upset that I wanted to cry, and Yeji started screaming for someone to get me paper towels and you laughed until you cried that it made us laugh, too, remember?" There was a fond smile on his face when Hyunjin finally moved his hands away from covering his eyes.

"That _was_ stupid," Hyunjin grinned despite himself. Seungmin nudged him with his knee as if to say _see?_ "It's just – " he blubbered. "I can't help but feel like you're leaving me behind."

Seungmin turned onto his side so he could face Hyunjin. "What do you mean?"

"Like," Hyunjin shut his eyes. "You and Yeji are so smart and when you get your perfect score on the TOEIC, you're going to go on to do even better things. And I'll always be the Hwang Hyunjin who sucks at math, you know?" He heard himself take a watery breath. "Like, you guys know what you want already, and I've just been trying to – to catch up to you guys this whole time."

"Hyunjin." Seungmin reached for his hand and held it in his own. "Hyunjin, you know that's not true."

Hyunjin sniffled. "I don't know," he said, pathetically.

"I don't have it all figured out, you know." But when Hyunjin finally opened his eyes, Seungmin was smiling as he said this. "Maybe you think I do, and maybe you think Yeji does, too, but honestly the future's just this – this big, _big,_ shapeless kind of thing that we're all a little bit scared of. And that's okay, okay?" Their fingers were clammy and sweaty pressed together but Seungmin didn't let go, so Hyunjin didn't either. "But sometimes, I'll think about how we eat watermelon sitting on your floor and watching the same movies, and I tell myself _well, even if everything else changes, we won't._"

"Also, you don't suck at math," Seungmin pointed out with an open-mouthed grin. "You got an A last semester, remember?"

Hyunjin kicked him at that. "_Hey._" And then he tangled their legs together and lowered his voice. There was this weird feeling swelling in his chest replacing the earlier trepidation, almost too big for his ribcage to hold. "Thank you, Seungminnie," he whispered.

"Mmm," Seungmin hummed in response. And in the dark, like that, they fell asleep.

When Hyunjin woke up a few hours later, Yeji was sitting on a pillow in front of his tiny TV, her face illuminated by the game she was playing on her phone. He wondered how long she'd been there before squinting and seeing a plate of watermelon dangerously close to her toes, one-third finished.

Seungmin's eyes were still closed next to him, his hand comfortably warm in Hyunjin's. The blast of wind from the fan – focused toward his bed, probably Yeji's doing – ruffled the top of his hair. And in the fog of being half-asleep, it came to Hyunjin suddenly and with a surprising clarity that in whatever future that would eventually come to be, he never wanted to let go.

They're waiting for the crosswalk signal to change again when Hyunjin asks Yeji: "It's always going to be the three of us, right?"

Yeji doesn't look over at Hyunjin from where she's staring at some point across the street. A honking car passes by in front of them, the sudden breeze stirring the wisps of loose hairs escaping Yeji's ponytail. Seungmin always pointed them out to her, and she'd re-tie her hair up, holding her elastic in her mouth. "It's because I'm growing my bangs out," Yeji mentioned once, and Seungmin bought her bobby pins for her birthday that year, along with a new set of pens.

"From me and Hyunjin," Seungmin grinned when she warily glanced at her brother. They all knew it just meant that Seungmin picked out the gift and Hyunjin helped him pay for some of it. Yeji grumbled a reluctant _thanks_ to him, anyway, out of courtesy.

But that's how it's always been, just like how summer's always been: Hyunjin, Yeji, and Seungmin, and the sun beating against their backs on their way back home from the library or one of Yeji's soccer games, a streak of sunscreen white on the side of Seungmin's face that Hyunjin wants to reach out and wipe away for him. The sound of Hyunjin's bike gears whirring and Yeji's roller blades hitting the ground once they say their goodbyes in front of Seungmin's apartment building, and the unspoken recognition that they both liked the same person, and that admitting it aloud could end up breaking one of their hearts.

So: "Us two and Seungmin," Hyunjin continues when he think Yeji didn't hear him. She skates on ahead as soon as the signal changes, and Hyunjin sighs before pedaling after her. "Hey, are you even listening to me?" he calls.

Yeji finally turns her head to face him, still looking disinterested. The sunlight, dropping like a yolk below a sea of cobalt, catches on those flyaways of hers. "Because what if," Hyunjin says before he can stop himself. "What if I like Seungmin?"

In the distance, there's the beginnings of a cicada song and the squeak of Yeji's roller blades as she makes a sharp turn. And then there’s the sound of Yeji's gasping kind of laugh that someone had made fun of her for in primary school before Hyunjin told that kid to her face that she was being mean.

"It won't always be the three of us," Yeji starts, punching him lightly in the shoulder. "You know, next year at this time, we'll be studying like crazy for our college entrance exams. And then who knows?" she shrugs, "We probably won't go to the same university. Have you ever thought about that?"

Hyunjin has but in a way, he hasn't. They all talked about these things so much that it almost made them seem far away and unreal compared to the heat of early August burning against his skin, and the way he's always imagined that their summers would go on like this, like the three of them, like Hyunjin and Yeji orbiting Seungmin in this tiny universe of theirs.

Maybe the myriad of emotions he's feeling at the realization show on his face, because Yeji laughs again after glancing over at him. "And that's not a 'what if,' you dummy," she grins as they pull into their apartment building, looking over her shoulder as Hyunjin pauses to lock his bike into the rack. The smile on Yeji’s face is genuine, but a weird slat of sunlight from the open door makes it look sadder somehow. "That's just reality."

Hyunjin's phone rings, waking him up from where he'd dozed off on his bed. In sleep, he'd rolled onto his open workbook, folding some of the pages. He tries to smooth them out as he picks up the call.

"Come over to the park," Seungmin's voice comes through the receiver. Hyunjin can almost hear his smile.

"What?" he murmurs, rubbing his eyes once he figures the pages are a lost cause.

Seungmin laughs, sounding staticky and far away. "Good morning." There's a crackling as he readjusts how he's holding his phone. "The sun went down hours ago, Hyunjin."

"Oh." Hyunjin checks his clock. It's already past nine. Yeji had some event with her soccer team, and Hyunjin hadn't left the house all day, vowing to prove her wrong and be half-done with his summer math assignment by the time she got back. "I knew that."

"Okay," Seungmin plays along. There's a pause, punctuated by the white noise over the line. "Do you wanna go see Jupiter?"

The park at night is empty, other than Seungmin, who's sitting on one of the swings. Hyunjin lays his bike down next to Seungmin's on the blacktop before trudging across the sand and taking the swing beside his. "What about Yeji?" is the first thing he says, in lieu of a greeting.

"Jupiter’ll still be here tomorrow," Seungmin shrugs. "And there's only two swings, anyway." He laughs as Hyunjin tries to shake the sand out of his sandals and ends up kicking one off instead. "Actually," he says when Hyunjin hobbles over to retrieve it. "I wanted to tell you something."

"Hmm?" Hyunjin looks up at the sky. In the pollution of the city, he can only make out a few faint stars and the moon, almost completely full. He wonders if, over the cicadas, Seungmin can hear the loud beating of his heart.

A nearby street lamp bathes Seungmin's face in a sticky amber kind of light. "To be honest, you can't really see Jupiter from Seoul," he starts, shaking his head with a small smile. Hyunjin tilts his head, the heavy feeling bubbling out of his chest through a laugh. "I tried already, okay! It's supposed to be over there," Hyunjin watches as he points upward, to the other side of the moon, "but there's just too much smog, I guess." He smiles before looking back at that point in the distance. "But that's not what I wanted to tell you," he continues, quiet.

"Oh." Hyunjin hugs the chains of the swing. The metal's oddly cold through his thin shirt and the smell of iron reminds him of the time Yeji dared him to jump off when they were in eighth grade, and he'd scraped his hands and knees against the concrete outside the sandbox.

"I didn't think you'd actually do it," she'd said as she helped him rinse off the gravel in the water fountain, waiting for Seungmin to come back with band-aids. He'd returned to find the two of them crying for completely different reasons as they sat on the bench, Yeji pressing a handful of soggy tissues against Hyunjin's palms. "I'm friends with such weirdos," Seungmin joked, and it'd made both them laugh through the tears streaming down their faces.

Seungmin takes his silence as a cue to go on. "Sometimes – " It's just that Hyunjin doesn't know how to tell him that it's like his heart's suddenly turned to lead and every beat of it hurts. "Sometimes I think about the three of us." Seungmin pauses, hitting the sand with the toes of his shoes to still his swinging. He looks at the sky, where he told Hyunjin Jupiter was supposed to be. "And I know I told you that we wouldn't change, even if everything else around us did."

Hyunjin doesn't think he turns to look at Seungmin. If anything it's just instinct, just like the first time Hyunjin realized he'd had a crush on Seungmin all along, just the inevitable gravitational pull bringing him back into orbit again. But he sees Seungmin twist his swing so he's facing Hyunjin, sees Seungmin take a deep breath in and then let it out. "But something did," he hears him say. "Something changed."

"Do you – " Hyunjin blinks once, twice, three times. He knows because he feels the beginning of tears pricking his eyes and he doesn't want them to fall, so he screws his eyes shut instead in order to brace for the impact. "Are you telling me – is it – do you like Yeji?" he whispers, afraid.

And Seungmin just laughs at that. "Hyunjin – Hyunjin, why do you think I asked you to come here and not Yeji?" Hyunjin shakes his head, confused, his eyes still closed. "No," he says tenderly, like he's scared that anything could ruin this moment. Hyunjin feels him lace their fingers together. "Hyunjin, I like _you._"

The aftermath is silent. There's still the faint buzz of the cicadas, and the soft sounds of Seungmin's breathing, and the hum from the overhead street lamp. But Hyunjin's convinced as soon as he opens his eyes, everything gentle about this instant will disappear and he'll be left empty-handed all over again, wondering what it'd be like to hold Seungmin's hand in the midst of the hottest week of summer so far.

"Do you hate me now?" Seungmin asks. Hyunjin shakes his head profusely. Seungmin laughs. "Okay, but will you at least look at me?"

And so he does. And there, in the galaxy of Seungmin's eyes and the pulse of Hyunjin's heart, so fast that he swears Seungmin can feel it through their sweaty, pressed-together palms, it's like a supernova has bloomed across the universe.

Yeji's sitting on Hyunjin's bed when he comes back from taking a shower. "Hey," she says, looking up from the game she's playing on her phone. There's a towel around her shoulders but some of the drops from her wet hair have spattered onto his unmade sheets.

"Hey," he frowns. "You know I don't like when you sit in my room with your hair wet." He tosses his own towel into his laundry basket and misses. "Also you did a bad job of cleaning the shower." Hyunjin had to deal with watching some of Yeji's disembodied long hairs slither down the shower drain like small snakes. They fight about it every few weeks, not like Hyunjin's good about cleaning the bathroom either.

Yeji puts down her phone and draws her knees to her chest. She knows that Hyunjin doesn't like her putting her bare feet onto his bed and used to do it all the time to annoy him, but it's long become a habit. "I saw you and Seungmin on the way home," she begins with a shrug. "In the park, on the swings."

Hyunjin freezes from where he's bent over, picking up his towel. "Oh," he echoes as he stands back upright. The fan whirs behind him.

Yeji watches as he tries to say something, closes his mouth, and then opens it again, and then minutes of silence have passed between the two of them. She shakes her head, interrupting the sequence with a large smile on her face.

"You and Hyunjin are so different," she remembers Seungmin telling her once with a laugh. "That sometimes I honestly forget you guys are twins."

Yeji had frowned at him. "I mean, would you wanna be related to someone like _Hyunjin?_" she asked. It'd been another one of those days when he'd overslept, and Yeji was still catching her breath from trying to get to Seungmin on time.

"But when you guys laugh you look so much alike," Seungmin grinned at her. "Has anyone ever told you that?"

Now, Yeji says to Hyunjin, "Hey." He looks up from where he'd been staring at his palms guiltily, as if he'd find what he wanted to say written down on them. "You know how mom likes to joke that I was supposed to be 'Yejin' instead? And that it's dad who wrote it down wrong?"

She puts her feet back down on the floor, pausing to think. "And she always says that we were supposed to match. _Hyunjin and Yejin._ That those names had a nice sound to them together, or something. But honestly, I was glad it didn't turn out like that." She wipes her ear with the corner of her towel. "You know, for the longest time, I thought things like, 'if we weren't siblings, then I would never want anything to do with you.' And that if our names turned out like that, I'd probably hate you even more."

"What does that have to do with anything?" Hyunjin finally blurts. His voice sounds stuck in his throat, like he's either about to laugh until his side hurts or burst into tears.

Yeji laughs. "I guess what I'm trying to say is, we still turned out okay, right?" She looks up at the hairline crack in Hyunjin's ceiling that Seungmin pointed out two months ago. "And that's kind of thanks to Seungmin. And that I'm happy," she grins back down to where Hyunjin's sitting on the floor, "And like the cool sister I am, I'll be okay."

Yeji doesn't expect Hyunjin to get up and sit on his bed next to her. To hug her and cry that he's sorry about how things turned out, because that's so Hyunjin – to apologize for the inevitable that no one blames him for – and for them to become closer because of it.

And like Yeji expects, he doesn't do any of that. What he does say, though, is: "Thank you," in a small voice, and it reminds Yeji of a comet streaking across the dark night sky before it hits the surface, finding its home on Earth.

Seungmin's elbow-deep into the ice cream freezer when Hyunjin finally catches up with them at the convenience store. "I can't _believe_ you guys left me behind like that," he huffs to Yeji, who's holding the door open so it doesn't close onto Seungmin's arm.

Yeji rolls her eyes. "It's not my fault that you were taking so long at the water fountain," she scowls. Seungmin re-emerges with their three Samanco, grinning victoriously. "Also me and Seungmin are really hungry."

"You guys are so mean," Hyunjin insists as they head over to the counter to pay. He puts a candy bar next to their ice cream once he realizes Yeji's paying. She glares at him. "Two against one is _so_ unfair!"

Seungmin laughs. "Well, we knew you'd catch up with us," he says, poking Hyunjin's cheek. Hyunjin pretends to grimace at it, which just makes him laugh more. "And you did, didn't you?"

Hyunjin scrunches his nose in mock-disdain. "I guess you're right," he agrees, reluctant, just as Yeji shouts, "Hwang Hyunjin, you liar!"

"I just asked the cashier why the green tea Samanco's always sold out," she says, throwing his candy bar at him. "And she said that they've never sold out before! You're just stingy with your money, aren't you!"

The convenience store doors ring as they exit. "Hey, don't blame me!" Hyunjin defends. "Blame your expensive tastes!"

"_Expensive taste?_" Yeji repeats as Hyunjin mounts his bike. "It's literally just 1000 more won!"

Hyunjin sticks his tongue out at her before pedaling off without them. "Hey, Hwang Hyunjin, get back here!" she shouts after him, Seungmin laughing beside her.

Because summer's always been: Hyunjin, Yeji, and Seungmin, and the sweat sticking onto their skin as they walk back home from the convenience store with their Samanco, always teasing Seungmin for eating his tail-first. The sun setting sooner and sooner on their way home as the break goes on, until they're out later than usual on one of those last days before school starts again, and Seungmin points to where Jupiter's supposed to be in the night sky. And the three of them gaze, unafraid, into where – on the other side of the city pollution – the cosmos are laid out before them, as vast and wide and infinite as their futures.

Because summer's always been: the warm comfort of falling asleep in the middle of watching one of the same old VHS movies that they can recite the lines to on the same old TV in Hyunjin's room instead of helping him with his summer homework, half-complete and shoved past Yeji's feet in sleep, the fan oscillating between them.

And it always will be.

**Author's Note:**

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